please please please help!! what are these??? how detrimental are they to plants?? they just came out of the soil when i flushed it out!!! i’ve used rainwater, i don’t think i’ve used it on this plant, but i could’ve, how to get rid of em? will neem oil be enough?? :(( on a ficus tineke which shows zero damage!! they jump around a lot, not very far though
well over half my well established roots have been totally destroyed :(
Oh no! I didn’t see that. That’s not good…. If you’re still looking for suggestions, I would thoroughly rinse the roots, take off any mushy ones, and grow it in water to make monitoring easier
1 like thank you regardless :), hopefully this is just a greedy bunch of springtails and they stop nibbling away at the roots now… im just shocked at how my baby hasn’t shown me any signs of distress!!! like!! half your underground hair is gone???!!!? and i’m perplexed as the only difference has been the rainwater, but i keep my bucket of rainwater in my room and constantly monitor it for signs of life, nothing is alive in the bucket, and i also use rainwater for my propagations, which also have no signs of life!! so confuseddddd 😭🥺
1 like this has made me want to switch all my plants to water…
1 like So strange! I hope the roots start growing again soon
1 like Sounds like springtails. They’re not harmful. They enjoy moist soil and will eat decomposing material. In fact, some people purposely buy them for planted terrariums. The only caution I have is, in my experience, ficus like their soil to dry a little bit between waterings. So if you have springtails, you might be watering more often than I do. But if your plant is happy, then I would just keep doing what you’re doing
2 likes that’s good to know if this is the case, but I do purposefully leave my ficus alone as i’m aware it likes to dry out. when i brought it from the shop i was immediately worried that the soil was staying damp too long, so i did a repot (into the same size pot) with a well draining soil with medium water retention, unless i messed something up, cause it was my first time mixing my own soil mix Lol! sand, perlite and orchid bark were the main ingredients with a little compost. have they been known to occasionally maybe go through live roots? so many of my roots are just… gone! it was decently close to needing a pot size up when i repotted it into new soil, and now it looks closer to slightly too small for its pot D:
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You could have a type of mealy bug that feeds on roots. Google mealy bugs on roots and you can compare the pictures to what you have.
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Poor baby !! Seems to be mostly springtails from what people here are saying , but I hope your baby keeps in good health !!
1 like I hope so!!! I’m letting all my plants dry out for the time being in case i do have some nasty & greedy springtails chomping away at my roots!! thank you for the kind words :)
0 likes Good idea !! Of course !!
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